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Wow -- this thread made for an amusing read this frigid winter morning while waiting for the missus to finish watching the news.
I am simply amazed at the loose definitions of legality and morality bantered about by some of the posters. My feeling is that ebooks -- much like digital copies of music, movies, and TV shows -- tend to be regarded as ephemera rather than tangible goods. One poster even stated that "his" generation is being raised to feel that it's ok to download copies of music and books simply because they aren't real, tangible objects.
Would any poster here would feel it within their right to walk into a bookstore and slip a copy of a paperback into their pocket or backpack because they didn't have the money to pay for it (as one poster justified to himself earlier) or it wasn't available in their country (as several posters have rationalized)? Of course not! That's because we have all been raised to understand that taking a tangible object is legally and morally wrong, no matter how rich or how poor a country in which we were raised. (The eastern bloc country rationalization made me laugh -- wonder if his grandparents waited in hours-long lines for toilet paper as was common in certain eastern countries years ago, or if they just stole it because it wasn't commonly available?)
Simply because digital files are available on the internet and therefore aren't tangible objects don't mean they should be taken any more than taking the physical copy from a store is ok. Sending a small donation to the pirate site that hosted the illegal copy doesn't justify downloading an illegal copy, nor does the argument that it's so poorly formatted that it's ok.
I wish the greedy publishers would take their older titles and use their unpaid interns and lowly paid junior editors to turn those books into ebooks. Every single new book published in recent years is already on a computer, so turning them into an ebook takes zero effort. There are no associated publishing costs (ie, ink, paper, etc), nor storage and transportation costs. The authors could still be paid their usual fees/commissions, and the publishers could still make a handsome profit (typically more than the authors receive). And we, the ebook consumers, would benefit by much lower prices that weren't subject to economic demands such as rising fuel costs!
Still, no matter how cheaply or widely available ebooks become there will always be people who will download copies of ebooks and music and movies they didn't pay for. My teenagers and their friends have spent small fortunes (at least for kids without jobs) on .99 cent mp3 downloads through iTunes, yet they freely swap enormous archives of pirated mp3s. Go figure.
The pirating ain't gonna stop, and neither will the arguments here!
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